OpenGL

[stirmac]

Hey folks, new guy here. Looks like the overwhelming favorite brand here is ATI. I've noticed in many benchmarks that Nvidia's products outperform ATI when rendering OpenGL applications. The app most important to me uses OpenGL, and I rarely need much CPU or graphic horsepower to run anything else. So the question is: in my case, is the Nvidia card (5900) a better option than the ATI card (9800 pro), or is the performance penalty so minor that it doesn't matter?

Regards,
Stirling

 

[Willamette_sucks]

How bout telling us what the application is?

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too
Rachel: why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?

 

[Crashman]

If I were considering the 5900, I'd probably jump up to a 5950. If the price difference was too much, I'd find out which 5900's are best for reflashing to 5950 BIOS.

As for OGL, my 9600 Pro worked fine under Solidworks 2003 benchmarking.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[stirmac]

The app is the flight sim X-Plane.

http://www.x-plane.com/

"Pain is weakness leaving the body."

 

[stirmac]

Budget is definitely an issue (kids will do that to ya!). Regarding flashing the bios on a 5900, I've never done that. Is it much like flashing a motherboard bios? Does this void the warranty? What does it do? Looks like the primary difference between the 5900 and 5950 is 75 Hz chip clock and 100 Hz memory clock.

Regards,
Stirling

"Pain is weakness leaving the body."

 

[Crashman]

It's like flashing the board, it does void your warranty unless of course you flash back to hide your behavior
I think it's more than just a clock change, but I don't know what the technical details are exactly.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Fusan]

I believe it changes the clock speed and also the fan speed to keep up with the overclock.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Well actually if you want the best FPS it's system, dependant, and more so than you would think.

The guys at X-plane have said that the MAC G5 gets great performance with the R9800Pro, and it outperforms comparable Windows rigs.

Grabbed from FiringSquad.

<font color=blue>from the guy that writes X-plane:
<i>
http://www.x-plane.org/

"Some people say it is not the fastest, but they are
grasping at straws based on whatever statistics they can find...
but I have run X-Plane on it and I have seen that for X-Plane, it
is the fastest. 120 fps on a NON-OPTIMIZED copy of X-Plane.
Optimizing hops us up 25% from that. How many Windows users can
get 150 fps on X-Plane? (no rendering options, 7 miles vis) Try
it. You won't. The G-5 does."</i> </font color=blue>

OpenGL is a strange Kettle of fish, nV has a history of better performance, but funny that while Q3 was tops on nV now the R9800s are showing up better than the FXs, and this also carries over to COD. Yet still the majority of performance wins do go to the nV series. However it does show that nothing is that clear cut.
It depends alot on the way the program addresses the extensions and the hardware involved and their benifits/advanatges.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK